From Businessman to President, yet Still a Businessman: A Psychosocial Analysis of Cross-Cultural Frame Stickiness in Cyberspace

This paper investigates how foreign leaders’ political identities are collectively constructed online, focusing on the persistent framing of Donald Trump as a “businessman” on Chinese social media. Using a mixed-methods analysis of 234,000 posts across five platforms (2015–2024), we reveal that this frame dominates discourse (80.6% prevalence in 2024). It functions as a “business filter,” an interpretive schema through which users systematically decode Trump’s policies. We introduce the concept of “frame stickiness” to explain how cognitive heuristics, social validation, and algorithmic amplification create a reinforcement loop that resists contradictory evidence. Crucially, China’s decades of market-oriented reforms provide the cultural bedrock legitimizing this commercial logic. Ultimately, our multi-level model of collective meaning-making advances cyberpsychology and offers practical implications for international political communication and public diplomacy.